Amazon Announces Free Monitoring for Amazon EC2 Instances

I've been a Rackspace Cloud customer for years, and happily so, but it's this constant drumbeat of innovation and forward momentum at Amazon that makes me seriously reconsider my choice.<p>I really want to see Rackspace step up its game over the next year, if for no other reason than to keep Amazon on its toes.

What will be the impact of this on third party monitoring apps like CloudKick.?May be they have to provide more value addition on other areas of cloud computing like custom building of servers , automating sys-admin etc.

Better info in the email they sent out:<p><i>Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,<p>We're excited to let you know that as of today, all Amazon EC2 instances come with free Basic Monitoring metrics from our Monitoring service, Amazon CloudWatch. You don't need to do anything to make this happen. It's there for you to use. Simply sign in to the AWS Management Console and select one of your active instances. You will immediately be able to view graphs and track performance on metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic.<p>Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 provides metric data on instance performance at five-minute frequency. Customers can optionally choose to enable Detailed Monitoring, which provides metric data at one-minute frequency for an additional $0.015 per instance-hour.<p>In addition, starting today you can now set alarms for any metric that Amazon CloudWatch monitors. You can configure these alarms via API call to send notifications or initiate Auto Scaling actions when metrics cross certain thresholds. Alarm pricing starts at $0.10 per alarm per month.<p>All the features mentioned above are available immediately in all regions (US-N. Virginia, US-N. California, EU-Ireland, APAC-Singapore), and we invite you to try them today! Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch at: aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch.<p>Sincerely,<p>The Amazon Web Services Team<p>P.S. Amazon CloudWatch monitoring remains free of charge for Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS DB instances.</i>

Wow! Amazon just keeps getting better and better (and cheaper and cheaper). Hmmm...what are they up to?

a direct link to the post being referenced: <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/12/03/announcing-free-monitoring-for-amazon-ec2-instances/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/12/03/announc...</a>

This definitely sweetens the deal. AMZN's monitoring facilities have been expensive and not really all that good.

Cop up, who's startup just died ?<p>I hope it was more like a "startup idea" though.

After the introduction of micro instances, cloudwatch costs were simply unjustified. Way to go Amazon – best news I've heard this week!

Kudos! But this should have been done long ago.

Free monitoring... right, yes, I suppose you get monitoring by the NSA for free :)

Free Monitoring, it's like when they kicked out Wikileaks from their cloud? Nice feature.